I'm not 100% sure they're related, but I've been getting a lot of these and it seems basically any GUI program is likely to have one or more "CRITICAL" error before starting up so something fundamental seems to be broken somewhere I just don't even know where to start. Does anyone have any ideas of how to track this down?

2 Answers
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in the gedit preferences, under plugins, under the spell check plugin, do you have a list of languages to select from?

If not, you may need to verify that all the dependent packages are installed. ( pango and/or aspell-en (for engligh) )

As for the file-roller errors, what version of gnome libraries are being used by xfce?

You mention that this problem has occured since installation... do you mean the installation of fedora 16, or the installation of XFCE. if the latter, can you switch to gnome3 and see if the error persists?

If it doesn't, use strace to follow the system calls of file-roller under XFCE or under Gnome3, and see if they're calling the same libraries, or if one or the other has a lot of ENOENT statuses while looking for files.

It might be as simple as the case that there is a dependent package that is not properly tagged as such, and thus is not installed. Like gedit being installed without any languages.

Pango and Aspell-en were installed, but reinstalling them seem to have fixed the gedit problem, thanks. I'm not sure whether the error was before or after installing XFCE - I certainly didn't notice it before then, but then I didn't use it for very long before I couldn't deal with Gnome 3 anymore so I likely wouldn't have noticed. I'll give switching a go and get back to you on that. How do I check what version gnome libraries are in use? (gnome-open --version outputs GNOME gnome-url-show 2.32.1 if that's useful).
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Thor84noNov 29 '11 at 16:32

Such messages are common with Gnome applications and do not necessarily indicate a bug. Gnome takes a dumbed-down approach to users; the intended audience won't run an application from a terminal and so won't see these messages. Redirect error output from Gnome applications to a log file if you really care, or to /dev/null otherwise.